Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

When research is so connected to personal interest, experience, and familiarity that objectivity becomes a moveable feast, the line between documentation and invention blurs to near-invisibility. John Freeman asks what it means to locate oneself into research findings and narrative reports, and what happens when one's self goes further and becomes the research. Subjecting received truths to a series of hard questions, readers are taken on a journey through self-performance, traumatic memoir, the lure of weasel words, emotional evocation, the vagaries of memory, creative nonfiction, cultural appropriation, illusion masquerading as truth and the complex ethics of university research. Case studies from international autoethnographers run through the book and appendices provide invaluable advice to university researchers and supervisors.

About the Author

John Freeman is the head of theater at Falmouth University and an adjunct associate professor at Curtin University, Western Australia. He is author of Tracing the Footprints; New Performance/New Writing; Blood, Sweat & Theory; and The Greatest Shows on Earth, and has written extensively on theater, art, pedagogy, and contemporary performance.